What Games Are: Game Design, Development, Publishing, Marketing and Art

Is The Facebook App Center A Big Deal?

Last year I posted that Facebook was effectively over as a disruptive game development platform. My reasoning was that Facebook relied too much on algorithmic solutions to drive visibility, which was then gamed by a few companies, and largely failed at introducing users to new games.

Unless Facebook were to produce a highly visible app store, I thought, Zynga had won. I also thought Facebook would not make such a store. Happily I was apparently wrong.

Your Game Is A Graph

Forget everything else for a moment and consider that your game is just a graph of users over time. There is more than one kind of viable graph, but knowing which kind you are aiming for is important. It should affect every strategic or marketing decision that you make. This week's news that Draw Something's user numbers have already dropped by 30% is significant, for example. It makes Zynga's purchase of it look like a lot of money spent based on misunderstanding that game's graph.

Do you know which kind of graph you are creating, and are you making the right choices to improve it? Are you targeting your monetization strategy in the right way, or are you basing it on a faulty understanding of its likely graph?

Is Google+ the Next Big Thing? [Platforms]

The social games industry sprung back into the news last week after a quiet few months with the exciting revelation that Google+ had officially opened up its games business. Offering a clean design, an attractive financial package and even a hosting solution, it seems like it could be the next hot ticket platform.

But is it?

I Think Facebook is Over [Social Games]

If Facebook games are an arms race, then Zynga have clearly won it. They have more users than their next nine competitors combined and a lock on cross promotion that can’t be beaten. Only Zynga is able to regularly make games that will acquire more than 20 million users, and they have been tenacious to a fault in dominating every channel they can find.

Meanwhile their competitors can only look on and stare at their own (mostly) declining fortunes. One publisher really does rule them all, and is about to IPO itself a couple of billion dollars to become as big as Activision. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

How Engagement Killed Gameplay [Language]

(with thanks to Casper Moller)

I used to hear the word gameplay bandied around by executives a lot. Everyone would say that their game was all about innovative gameplay, and believe it, even though most of their games looked and acted just like every other game. However something has changed.

Nobody in those meetings talks about gameplay any more. It seems to have fallen by the wayside. Now everyone’s talking about engagement. It’s changing the way that games are thought of, and so the kinds of games that are getting funded and developed.

Engagement has, in a sense, killed the ideal of gameplay, how we see games, and certainly how we will develop them in the future.

Art is the Best Business [What Games Are]

In response to yesterday’s post about forgetting the money, Jeremy Springfield kindly shared a presentation by Scott MacMillan. Scott’s presentation is about why his indie studio fell apart. His conclusion is that art and business are at opposite ends of a scale, so he thinks an indie studio must be in the middle somewhere. With sympathies to Scott for his studio’s fate, his framework is wrong.

Not only is art a business, it is the best business to be in. Madonna, Apple, James Herbert, Valve, Ogilvy, Terry Pratchett and Lady Gaga are all in the art business in one form or another. So are you. The questions are do you realise it, and do you understand how the art business works?

Are You Invisible? [Marketing Stories]

The Invisibility Differential Diagnosis:

• Your game is a console-movie tie-in
• Your game is on the App Store, on the second page of the Strategy category
• Your game is named something like Town Ville
• Your marketing strategy is based on exposure via Applifier
• Your game launched in the middle of the charts
• Your art style is inspired by a genre leader
• Your game design is trying to appeal to all four Bartle types
• Your PR strategy consists of talking about unique selling points
• Your indie game contains ordinary retro graphics
• Your game gets described by others as ‘it’s like A meets B’

I’m afraid the diagnosis is: you are invisible.

The Games Industry's Age Problem [Trends]

I was at an event hosted by NESTA in which Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope presented a top-line summary for a report talking about the problems of education in the UK. Specifically what they talked about was how to train young people with better sets of skills to equip them for digital industries like games or visual effects.

The thing I noticed more than anything else, however, was that (at 37 years old) I was one of the youngest people there. In a room of luminaries from the digital industries in the UK, all I could see was a mass of bald heads and grey hair. Where were the young companies and the new generation?

Nowhere that I could see. I think that might be a problem.

Surfing At The Back Of The Wave [Resonance]

The business mind relies on numbers. Numbers are proof, numbers indicate whether something is real, and so numbers help to guide strategy. What people coming into the games business from the outside often do is try to treat it like a normal business. They want to measure trends, take baby steps, and only take chances when they are sure that they are onto something.

In the process they miss the wave. Resonance is not static. It is a waveform, and by the time the business person has settled himself with what the market is, how it works and what it needs to do, the opportunity has often passed by.

The Complete 'CityVille Explained' [Social Games]

All this week I've been posting parts of an article talking about the newest Zynga sensation, CityVille, and explaining how it works. With the article now completed, here are all four posts:

• Part 1, about what CityVille is and why visibility matters
• Part 2, about the gameplay and how it drives retention with open loops
• Part 3, about the social features and the idea of reciprocal trade
• Part 4, about the financial side, how the game makes money, as well as some final thoughts